


Now do I see the earth anew

by ShariDeschain



Category: Ragnarok (TV 2020)
Genre: Gen, Laurits is Loki, Post Season 1, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:02:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22681408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShariDeschain/pseuds/ShariDeschain
Summary: In wondrous beauty once againShall the golden tables stand mid the grass,Which the gods had owned in the days of oldOr, the one where Magne dreams of Asgard and Loki wakes up.
Relationships: Magne Seier&Laurits Seier
Comments: 18
Kudos: 177
Collections: COW-T - the Clash Of the Writing Titans, Ragna_rok





	Now do I see the earth anew

The fight ends, Magne wins, but there's another battle that keeps going on in his mind: it has nothing to do with him, and at the same time it’s the most powerful thing he’s ever owned. He relives it every step he takes as he leaves the docks, and when he gets home, still covered in mud and Vidar's blood, he feels light-headed and emptied of any emotion. 

He steps in the living room and Laurits is right there, sitting at the kitchen table, earphones over his head, his attention ostensibly captivated by the bowl of cereals in front of him. 

Magne stares at his brother for a moment, a crazy story about ancient gods and long-forgotten wars burning on his tongue, ready to be shared, but Laurits very clearly makes a point of not looking back at him, which, in the end, is something Magne is only mildly disappointed about. It’s nothing unexpected. 

He starts heading for the stairs, craving a shower and a night's sleep, not necessarily in that order, but he only manages to take nine steps before Laurits calls out to him.

“You smell, brother”, he says in that sing-song voice he uses when something is particularly funny to him.

Magne turns slowly on his feet and just stands there, halfway up the stairs, in his ripped-out clothes, rain dropping from his hair, crusts of blood covering his hands. His own smell isn't something he's ever been overly concerned about so far, but it stands to reason that it might not be the best.

“Smell of what?”, he asks, and to his own ears his voice sounds unnatural and old, like there are rocks crumbling down his throat.

Laurits sniffs the air and wrinkles his nose, pretending he’s considering the question very carefully, but he still doesn’t look up from his cereals, which is probably his way to say that he finds this whole situation is way beneath him.

“Like ozone, I think”, he finally declares. “And like fire.”

Magne mulls over the information for a few moments, then decides he doesn't know what to do with that, and since Laurits doesn't look like he wants to offer him any other insights on the matter, he turns around and resumes the laborious climb towards his room. 

Ozone is the smell of lighting and thunderstorms, his brain reminds him as soon as he reaches the hall. 

When he closes the door he feels like a soft laughter is following him inside, but the only sound coming from downstairs is the muffled music of his brother’s headphones, as Laurits turns them on again. 

He needs a moment to recognize it as the same music he’s heard that night at Jutulheim, the music he’d danced and drank mead to, the music that had first revealed to him the part of himself that finally woke up tonight.

Laurits had danced to that same music too, Magne remembers, and the battle raging in the back of his mind suddenly becomes darker and more violent, as if it were a ship at the mercy of the waves.

*

The next day is all too quiet. School is over, he doesn’t know where Gry is or what Fjor, Saxa and Ran are doing, and there’s no news about the owner of the Jutul Industries being found dead on a pier. Magne roams the cramped space of his own bedroom like a ghost with unfinished business to attend to, and no way to do so.

The fever hits him mid-morning, bending his knees and forcing him to crawl back to his bed. Mom comes and go, says things Magne forgets the moment she’s out of the room, and she looks worried but doesn’t ask questions, which makes things easier for her and difficult for him. 

He takes the medicine she offers, sips his chicken broth and even drags himself to the sink to brush his teeth, but it doesn’t matter what he does, he can still taste the blood in his mouth, and eventually he's forced to admit he doesn't dislike it.

At some point of the day Laurits sits at the foot of his bed and starts chatting about this and that, and Magne doesn’t really follows, he only understands that something’s happened the day before and the principal was not happy about it, and his brother may or may not be in trouble, but he still had a lot of fun.

“Your hair is red”, Magne whispers, because that strikes him as the most important thing right now. 

Laurits touches his hair with a proud smile.

“Blonde, you mean.”

Magne shakes his head. He feels himself sway.

What he sees is long, red hair, and eyes like burning coals. What he hears is the hissing of snakes and the howling of wolves and laughters that were never kind. His brother doesn’t look like his brother anymore, and yet he still feels like family, like shared blood and sacred oaths.

Now Laurits' hand is pushing against his forehead and his fingers are thin and as cold as ice, and for a reason Magne can’t explain, he doesn’t trust them anymore.

“You should go back to sleep”, Laurits says from far away, as an uncharacteristically worried brow clouds his face. “Before Mom decides we need to haul your heavy ass to the hospital and I have to spend my whole day surrounded by old people.”

His words fall into silence as the atmosphere around them shifts into something new and ancestral and they move at the same time, but for opposite purposes. Laurits tries to withdraw his hand, but Magne is quicker and grabs his wrist with such an urgent violence, his brother cries out in pain. Magne doesn’t dislike that either.

“Don’t you remember the end?”, he asks, lifting himself on one elbow to get closer to Laurits’ face. He needs to know if there’s any recognition there. “The broken shields, and the moon swallowed down by the wolf? Flame from the south, ice from the north. Don’t you remember it?”

Magne remembers the end, or at least something of it. The battle he remembers for sure: the sky made of blood, the earth turned into mud, the ecstasy of the violence. Swords and spears and gods and thunders, and the intoxicating realization that he was fighting the last fight of his life.

“You’re crazy”, Laurits hisses as he pulls back and tries to break Magne’s hold, shaking him back to the present. “Let me go.”

“You were there too”, Magne insists because there may not be awareness yet in his brother’s eyes, but something inside him remembers and doesn’t want to forget anymore. “You were there, at Ragnarok. On a ship made of nails, and the dead followed in your stride.”

Laurits’ face is paler than usual now. Magne can smell his sweat and feel his heartbeat racing. He licks his lips because he knows he’s winning, even when Laurits yanks his arms back again and shakes his head.

“I’m calling Mom”, he warns him, but he’s almost blabbing and this time there’s a shadow there, behind his eyes. “You’re delirious and you’re freaking me out.”

There’s something else, something Magne cannot remember. His grip now is so hard he can feel his brother's pulse under his fingertips, and he knows he’s hurting him, and he doesn’t want to do that. There has never been violence between them because Magne’s always been too aware of his own strength to allow himself to use it with his own family.

No, he doesn’t want to hurt Laurits. But he wants him to admit the truth, and that’s always been a hard task. His brother’s always needed a little nudge.

He pulls Laurits closer to him, their faces almost touching, their hot breaths mixing.

“Don’t you remember?”, Magne asks again, and there are sparks over his skin now, and the smell of ozone is indeed very strong on him.

“No! No, I don’t”, Laurits yells, his lips quivering, and when Magne tightens his hold just a little more he cries out again and quickly amends his words. “Not like you said, not like that.”

Magne smiles, baring his teeth. 

“But you do remember?”

Laurits’ starts crying in furious, hard sobs.

“Yes. Yes!”, he admits in tears. “Now let me go, you damn idiot!”

Magne does just that, and Laurits falls back from the bed, ending up on the floor. On the arm he immediately clutches to his chest there are now red blotches that are a painful promise of bruises to come.

Magne looks down him and knows he should feel guilty about it, but he doesn’t. Loki never felt guilty about Ragnarok, he’s sure of that. 

When Laurits gets up and runs out of the room Magne lets himself fall back on his bed, finally pleased. The war in his mind begins to slow down, until everything is quiet and motionless. A deserted battlefield.

So he sleeps. 

And he dreams of Asgard. 

*

He loses hours, then he starts losing days. Laurits never comes back, but Isolde does.

She talks to him about a battle started when the first dawn had shone upon the Earth that will only end along with the last human being. She talks to him about responsibilities and debts that will never be repaid, and her voice sounds older than it will ever be.

Crows and eagles also talk to him, they tell him stories about old friends he doesn’t remember, about enemies he’s already defeated, about lovers he’s never kissed, or touched, or held.

The taste of mead and apples and warm beer washes away the bitterness of the medicines, and he feels the kisses of the summer sky on his skin even as his body freezes and the sheets underneath him get soaked with sweat.

Behind his eyes everything is golden, and young, and eternal. It’s all lost now, but the yearning is so sweet on the tongue, the memories like a gentle touch on the tired soul. 

As he remembers, he regains years, then decades, then centuries, and eventually he feels like he’s whole again.

 _There are other gods_ , a woman says then, and she’s not Isolde or a crow, and she’s been an eagle from time to time, but now she spends most of her time behind a supermarket counter, waiting.

 _Wake up_ , she says.

And just like that the fever breaks, and Magne is Magne again.

Plus something more.

*

He finds Laurits in his bedroom, curled up in a corner of his bed, reading. It’s been almost a week, and they both look different, older, but not necessarily wiser.

Magne hesitates in the doorway, a fist raised as if to knock, an unusual polite gesture no one has ever done in their home. He feels shy.

Laurits glances at him over the pages of his book, and as they stare at each other Magne thinks of dozens and dozens of ways to start this particular conversation, but he can’t force himself to open his mouth and let any words out.

So Laurits does it for him.

“We’re enemies, then”, he says, and he’s trying to sound careless and derisive, but he’s never been good at pretending fun.

“We aren’t”, Magne denies, because he doesn't have a lot of certainties right now, but this is one of the few that he's holding on to.

“This book of yours says we are”, Laurits retorts, raising the school library’s copy of _Gods and Myths of Northern Europe_ and wavering it around.

Magne has read that book too, he knows the stories that are written in it, and he knows many others that have never been told at all. 

“Maybe we were, once”, he answers easily. “But now we’re brothers, aren’t we?”

Laurits hold his gaze for a moment more, then he lowers it down again on the pages, like he can’t be bothered.

“If you like”, he scoffs.

“I do”, Magnus confirms.

He walks into the room and doesn’t stop until he gets to his brother's bed. He’s been too big to share a single bed with someone else for years now, but when he moves to lay down next to him, Laurits makes room without complaining.

For a while the only noise in the room is the faint turning of the pages and their slow, steady breathing. On the ceiling above Laurits’ bed there are new runes engraved, a spell Magne doesn’t recognize. He wants to ask his brother what does he remember, if he’s seen too a lost city of gold and silver with walls so high they touched the sky, and a tree so huge it ended in eight other worlds.

But it would be a stupid question, and the past is not what they need to focus on at the moment.

“So… any idea on what to do now?”, he asks instead, and from the corner of his eyes he sees Laurits smile that special smile that has got them into trouble so many times as children, the same smile that hundreds of years ago promised adventures - not always pleasant ones perhaps, but never any less than fun.

“Of course”, Laurits answers, and there’s already a laughter hiding in his voice.

Outside it stops raining for the first time in days.

**Author's Note:**

> \- Written for the COWT #10 @ landedifandom, prompt "Nell'estasi e nel fango"
> 
> \- I think Laurits being Loki is not even a real spoiler at this point, but I needed to see it happen YESTERDAY, so I wrote it myself because what fanfiction are for, if not this?
> 
> \- Title, intro and several quotes come straight out the Völuspá.


End file.
